This is of course not meant to be a final word on the subject, but instead is a data-driven look at the relationship between match length and perceived match quality.
The chart above plots Cagematch.net ratings against match duration, sourcing the more than 43,000 matches in the database that have the required minimum of 5 votes to display a rating. The matches go from the present all the way back to 1929. (Yes, there’s a Gus Sonnenberg vs. Ed Stranger Lewis match from 1929 that has 6 votes on the site, which I assume there’s video for online somewhere but I couldn’t quickly find it.).
Each dot above (whose opacity is greatly reduced to make for a more meaningful chart) represents a match. The light blue line represents the smoothed median rating (using LOESS), showing the general trend of how match duration correlates with Cagematch voter ratings.
At first, as you can see, match ratings rise sharply as match time goes on. It’s important to note that Cagematch only allows users to rate matches that are at least five minutes long, so the shortest matches in this study start there. A match at the minimum five minutes starts with a typical rating of around 5.0. Ratings generally improve as duration increases. The trend rises at a similar rate up to the 15-minute mark or so. Then past the 20-minute mark, the trend still rises but at a slower rate.
Intuitively, I think many would agree that a match that has the potential to be received by the typical Cagematch voter as a good match is generally well-served with a match time that’s somewhere over 10 minutes, and maybe under 20 minutes. That supposition probably also rests on the notion that, generally, greater match time is given to matches that will benefit from it. That is, a rational wrestling booker usually doesn’t put weaker performers or a weaker match in a position to go long, but rather the other way around. At least among rated matches, that seems to generally be the case. Maybe rationality is common among wrestling bookers after all, if specifically on the issue of match time.
This article was also published for Wrestlenomics subscribers. Signup now on Patreon or Substack to unlock access to paywalled and ad-free reporting and analysis on the business of pro wrestling.
The challenge of a match being rated higher seems to increase the farther you go over the 30-minute mark. And, again, that seems to make intuitive sense. Wrestlers who are quite good might be capable of a really good match if given 10 to 20 minutes, but going over 30 minutes generally calls for an exceptional match and/or exceptional performers. By contrast, wrestling fans are familiar with the experience of watching a match that goes on too long, which would’ve been better if it had been at least a few minutes shorter.
I can hear already some readers announcing their preference for matches that stay under a certain time limit. But we unsurprisingly have relatively little data on really long matches. Just 3% of all rated matches went 30 minutes or longer.
You’ll notice the trendline starts bending in a negative direction after about the 40-minute mark. One more insight we can draw, which probably also affirms intuitions, is that this seems to be mainly an effect caused by older matches, rather than more recent ones. That is, older matches — which often did go longer — may have the disadvantage of being viewed by Cagematch “inmates” with modern eyes (the earliest ratings seem to be from around 2009) who have seen plenty of wrestling in a style that evolved long after the match in question. Certainly, matches from, say, the 1970s generally had different goals (not to mention an audience with very different predispositions about what they were watching) than matches in the 2020s. And the concept of “match quality” was probably nascent at best. Jack Brisco and Giant Baba probably didn’t expect that, a few decades later, their NWA title matches would be appraised on a scale from 1 to 10 by people not even born yet.
On the other hand, when we’re talking about 40-minute matches, we should probably be cautious. There are just 312 matches with ratings in the Cagematch database that went at least 40 minutes, which is less than 1% of all 43,390 rated matches. Nonetheless, if we separate, say, all matches from 2020 and after from all matches before 2020, we see a really straight line for matches beyond 40 minutes for the later period.
In both the 1929–2019 and 2020–present time segments, again, we’re of course talking about relatively small portions of the overall data that go 40 minutes or more: 0.3% (94 matches) for 2020 to the present; 1.2% (219 matches) for pre-2020.
I suppose what I think the blue trendline really represents is sort of the burden of expectation, which generally rises the longer the match goes on. The more time you ask for from the audience, the “value” of the match (whatever that is — whether you think the Cagematch voters have it right or you think it should be something totally different) needs to also increase. You could apply that notion to a lot of forms of entertainment, including, say, movies. If a short movie or book is bad, that’s one thing. But if it goes on forever and it’s bad, that’s worse because of the amount of time it demanded from you. If it’s unusually long, it’d better be great, and wrestling, like films and novels, carries a similar expectation for an epic to justify its length.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.